StartupBus Europe hits the road: Here’s how you can get involved

This morning in central Amsterdam, I joined 26 bleary-eyed entrepreneurs, developers and designers in boarding a bus that will become our home for the next three days.

Yes, StartupBus Europe has hit the road for a journey that is partly a hackathon, partly a tour of some of Europe’s hottest tech cities, and partly a really long way of driving to Paris for LeWeb, which begins on Wednesday.

As we travel, teams of entrepreneurs, developers and designers will create products which will then be demoed at an event in Paris on Tuesday night.

This morning saw participants pitch 28 product ideas to the rest of the bus as we sped down the Dutch highway. Ideas spanned everything from a game built on top of Foursquare and a discovery app for educational podcasts, to an interactive voicemail app and a dashboard to help you pay your bills on time. Teams are now forming around the ideas they want to get involved in – which ones will make the cut?

We had just entered Germany when this story was published

How to get involved

You can join us in person at one of the stop-off points along our route in Copenhagen, Berlin and Zurich – or at our eventual destination in Paris.

Tonight, Startup Bootcamp will be hosting us at its base on the Nokia campus in Copenhagen. There will be drinks, a pitch competition and plenty of time to network with fellow entrepreneurs. Register here!

On Monday afternoon Startup Bootcamp will be hosting a startup lunch for us in Berlin around 2pm. More details about this will follow.

On Tuesday morning we will be at Google in Zurich for breakfast, a tour and more pitching competitions. You can register to join us here.

Look out for the bus at LeWeb too.

If you can’t join us in person, you can get involved online. You can track our progress around Europe via the map on the website, and there’s a stock market game where you will be able to ‘invest’ in shares in the teams on the bus – will you back the eventual winner? The teams are still forming at the time of writing, so keep checking the game for its launch.

You can expect regular reports from our trip right here on The Next Web.

Martin Bryant Editor-in-Chief at The Next Web. You can find him on Twitter, subscribe to him on Facebook, circle him on Google+ and visit his personal site. He's based in Manchester, UK and has a thing for quirky American music and Japanese video games.